Monthly Archives: November, 2015

The store address of the Taunton store is a bit of a mystery. From the store number 110, I can gather it opened in the spring of 1922. The 1970s store list says it was at 18a/19 East Street, of which the Woolworths Museum has the below photo.

These are more recent photos, where you can see the building is the same one as from the 1950s photo, but the address of the photos say it is Fore Street. Also the new store number 1189 would have been allocated in the 1990s, similar to the Reading store.

The building does not look like a 1950s building, it is certainly older, so perhaps the street numbering was changed sometime between the 1950s and today – I don’t know. 19 East Street today houses Sports Direct which looks like a new building. What I can say that the Woolworths building still looks grand, and it is easy to see why it was called the grandest Woolworths store in Somerset.

51/67 Linthorpe Road, Middlesbrough, Teeside TS1 5BT

The eighth Woolworths branch to open in the UK was at Middlesbrough, back in 1911. According to the 1913 Kelly’s Directory of North and East Ridings of Yorkshire, it originally opened at 91-93 Linthorpe Road, but then moved to bigger premises at 51 -67, as pictured below.

Middlesbrough Woolworths 1920s?

Source: 100thbirthday.co.uk

Middlesbrough was bombed quite severely in WWII and Woolworths was hit. The store was rebuilt throughout the 1950s, reopening with a more modern look in 1959.

Middlesbrough Woolworths 1959

Source: 100thbirthday.co.uk

It traded for another 20 years before closing down in the 1980s when Kingfisher took over.

The building was split into 3 units and occupied by Currys, Champion and Fosters in the 1980s.

Today the building is now occupied by USC and River Island – the closed down unit was Currys.digital until recently. You can see from the below photo how imposing a building it was. It would have been quite a large Woolworths store.